Hagia Sophia Back as a Mosque, What the 2020 Erdoğan Decree Changed Above the Bosporus

Ships entering the Bosporus from the Sea of Marmara pass under a skyline that has hardly changed in five centuries: Topkapı Palace on the point, and behind it the great dome of Hagia Sophia, flanked by four minarets. For 86 years that building was a museum, a deliberate statement by the Turkish Republic that its most famous monument belonged to everyone. On 10 July 2020 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made it a mosque again.

The legal route was quick. Turkey's highest administrative court, the Council of State, annulled the 1934 cabinet decision that had turned the building into a museum. Within hours Erdoğan signed a decree handing it to the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Two weeks later, on 24 July 2020, he attended the first Friday prayers held inside in 86 years, and a cleric gave the sermon holding a sword.

Photo: l0da_ralta, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fifteen centuries in one building

Emperor Justinian built the present Hagia Sophia in five years and dedicated it in 537. For nearly a thousand years it was the largest cathedral in the world and the seat of the Patriarch of Constantinople. When Mehmed II took the city on 29 May 1453, after cutting it off from the Black Sea with the fortress at Rumeli Hisarı, he rode to Hagia Sophia and had it turned into a mosque. The Ottomans added the minarets and buttresses and plastered over most of the figurative mosaics, which is partly why so many survived.

In 1934 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's government decided to make it a museum, and it opened as one in 1935. Restorers uncovered the mosaics of Christ, the Virgin and the emperors. For the secular republic, a museum was the point: a building that had been both a church and a mosque would now belong to history.

Why Erdoğan did it

Erdoğan had talked about reconverting Hagia Sophia for years. He did it in the summer of 2020, a year after his party lost Istanbul and Ankara in the 2019 local elections, with the lira falling and the pandemic hitting the economy. The decree gave his religious-conservative base a victory nobody could take away and gave the opposition a choice between cheering and looking unpatriotic. Most opposition leaders went along or said nothing.

That is the pattern of his rule: Islamic symbolism deployed when the economy and the polls go wrong. The same year he signed a second decree turning the Chora Church, the Kariye, with its 14th-century Byzantine mosaics and frescoes, into a mosque too; it reopened for prayers in May 2024. The reconversions undid one of the clearest acts of Atatürk's secular state, and they did it by presidential decree.

Abroad, the reaction was immediate. Greece called it an open provocation to the civilised world. UNESCO, which lists the building as part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul World Heritage Site, said it had not been consulted and asked Turkey for reports on the site's conservation. The World Council of Churches and the Ecumenical Patriarch, who still lives in Istanbul, protested. Pope Francis said he was "very pained". Erdoğan called the criticism an attack on Turkish sovereignty.

Visiting now

Hagia Sophia is a working mosque. Since 15 January 2024 foreign visitors have been separated from worshippers: they enter the upper galleries, where most of the surviving mosaics are, by a separate entrance, and pay a fee that stood at 25 euros in 2026. The ground floor, the prayer space, stays open without a ticket outside prayer times, with the usual dress rules, but the visitor route pauses around the five daily prayers and longest at Friday noon. Check prayer times before you go, and buy from the official museum ticket channel rather than a reseller.

The fee earns hard currency. The galleries keep tourists away from the carpets. The building gets a little of its museum role back, for those who pay.

The minarets still frame the southern mouth of the strait. What they mean has changed.